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Hespeler, 24 December 2023 © Scott McAndless
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16, Luke 1:46b-55, Romans 16:25-27, Luke 1:26-38

ne day Dave was just sitting around and shooting the breeze with his good buddy Nate. Dave, you see, had done pretty well for himself. He had built his own personal kingdom, had beat out many enemies and he was feeling pretty comfortable in his life. He had even recently built his own very nice house.

Dave had done so well not only because of his own initiative and strength, but also because he had had the support of a very powerful God named Yahweh. Yahweh was the God who had formed a very special relationship with the people of Israel but who had particularly chosen Dave as his special buddy. Thanks to God’s support, Dave had been able to do so much and, if he now had rest from his enemies, it was all thanks to Yahweh.

Dave’s Idea

But there was one thing that was bothering him, and so he spoke to his best friend about it. “See now,” he said to Nate, “I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent. What I mean is that my God has been a great support to me but he’s kind of wild and unpredictable. I mean, he lives in a tent, so he doesn’t have to settle down anywhere. That means that he can change his mind and may even decide to pick a new favourite.”

“Say no more!” Nate interrupted him. “I know exactly what you are thinking. You’re looking for some way to persuade God to settle down and formalize his choice of you and your descendants.

“And, in fact, I understand how you mean to do it as well. You want to build a house for God to live in. You want to domesticate Yahweh and even establish an institution and priesthood to tell God what he can and cannot do. You know, I think you should go, do all that you have in mind, after all, is not Yahweh with you, and don’t you want to make sure that things stay that way?”

Underlying Considerations

The Bible records that exchange between King David and the Prophet Nathan so briefly that you could be forgiven for just skimming over it. The surface meaning seems clear. David is apparently just concerned with making sure that God has a temple that does him all due honour. But there are always some underlying considerations to such plans. You only have to read between the lines to realize that David might have some other motivations in his proposal.

And, in fact, that is just what Nathan realized as well. In the heat of the moment, when David first threw out the idea, Nathan just agreed that it would be a great thing to do. But it didn’t take long. That very night, as Nathan reflected on David’s idea, he came to see that it was more than a little bit problematic. And, what’s more, Nathan realized that his sober second thinking wasn’t just something that was happening in his own brain. It was a word from Yahweh.

God’s Misgivings

God’s misgivings about David’s plans are expressed like this: “I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’”

The message is clear. Does God need a temple? Does God need some sort of religious institution and structure in order to be in a right relationship with God’s people? Certainly not! God seems to prefer the life of living in a tent and being free to move around. But it is not just about God being a camper at heart. As with most things having to do with religion, this is all about control.

Human Institutions

Human beings love to create religious institutions. They build temples and churches and mosques. They write their books of theology and even their holy books with one goal in mind. They want to control God. They want to say who God can be and what God can do. I mean, look at so much of our religious thought and practice, it is often reduced to statements of what God “has to” do. “If I make this sacrifice, God has to make it rain.” “If I confess, God has to forgive me.” “If God inspires scriptures, they have to be literally true.” “If I pray this particular prayer, God has to let me into heaven when I die.”

I understand the impulse, of course. Who wants to live with the concept of a God who is completely capricious and wild and does totally unpredictable things? But God resists being limited or controlled by us. And that is why, after some sober second thought, Nathan goes back to David with God’s answer and that answer is no, you can’t build a temple. But interestingly, at the same time, the answer is not no forever.

God Recognizes Our Need

God may not need temples and religious institutions in order to prove God’s greatness and glory but also seems to recognize our need for these things. And so, as an act of mercy and kindness, Nathan does inform David that his son, who will be somewhat less compromised by David’s history of using violence and trickery to get his way, will be allowed to establish a temple in Jerusalem.

This is actually an indication of God’s kindness and grace. As a concession to our weakness and limitations, God allows us to have a mediated relationship through a religious institution. You might even call it a sacrifice God makes on our behalf, sacrificing God’s own freedom and choosing to relate to us within the bounds of a religion.

But surely this is a temporary comprise. God is still seeking a more fitting way to be present here on earth. But this is not the time to implement that alternative plan. And so, God puts something in place that will set up that better way. “Moreover, Yahweh declares to you, David, that Yahweh will make you a house… Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.”

The Strange Visitor

“How can this be?” the young woman wanted to know. After all, what the strange visitor had told her seemed like crazy talk. He had told her that she would have a son, which was impossible enough. But then he had gone on to say, “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

The connection between that incident in the Gospel of Luke and Nathan’s answer to David is clear. Here, in this small house in the village of Nazareth, the conversation that started between David and Nathan so many centuries before was continuing. This wasn’t just about the impossibility of Mary, a virgin, having a child. This wasn’t just about the fulfillment of the promise of a house to King David. This was about God being present in this world outside of the limits of religious institutions.

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” the visitor continued, “and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.”

Holy cow, do you realize what this is saying? God, in some way that I’m not going to pretend to completely understand, is finding the ultimate way to enter into this world. Somehow, in Mary’s child, God is planning to enter into the human sphere. But God will do this in a way that sidesteps things like human-built temples, religious institutions and dogma. God is entering into our world in a way that does not require a priesthood or architecture or theologians to manage and control. By coming to us in a person, in Christ, God is maintaining the freedom to, well, to be God. And yet, because Christ comes as someone fully human, we are still able to relate to him as humans ourselves.

God’s Better Plan

You see, David came up with the plan all those centuries ago. It was a plan to try and limit God and tell God what to do. God said no, but did graciously continue to relate to the people of Israel through the religious institutions they eventually set up.

But in Jesus, God decided to do so much more. In Jesus, God decided to relate to human beings in a way that was not constrained by the walls of church or temple, by the judgments of a priesthood. God came to live among us as one of us.

And what do we see of God when he appears in Christ? When God is truly allowed to be God without human constraint here on earth? What we see is a God who reveals himself in love and compassion and mercy and ultimately in sacrifice, giving himself utterly in death upon the cross.

David was afraid to allow God to be God, and felt as if he had to keep God in a box. But in Mary’s child, God is set free to reveal a depth of love and grace that I suspect David could have only imagined. God is set free to reveal a love that is able to welcome all, no matter who they may be.

It kind of makes you wonder why David thought that he had to keep God under wraps. Kind of makes you wonder why we continue to think that we should try and tell God what God can do and be today as well.

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Hespeler, 17 December 2023 © Scott McAndless – Third Sunday of Advent
Psalm 126, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24, Luke 3:23-38, John 1:6-8, 19-28

If you are like most Bible readers, you might open the beginning of the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew or the end of the third chapter of Luke and balk. In both cases, you are presented with long lists of names, most of which mean absolutely nothing to you – the ancestors of Jesus. Who wants to read that?

The temptation, if you don’t give up reading altogether, is to just skip all of that and get to the good stuff – the stories and narratives about Jesus. But that might be a mistake. These lists do matter to the overall story – if you know how to read them, in fact, they are stories.

A Puzzle to be Solved?

Unfortunately, however, that is often not what people take away from them. In fact, most people who read them carefully usually come away with a problem that they think needs to be solved. You see, if you read the two genealogies of Jesus side by side, if you compare the names in them, they disagree in very significant ways.

They both identify Joseph as the father of Jesus, or at least the seeming father, but then they give different names for the father of Joseph. Matthew says that Joseph is the son of Jacob, while Luke says that he is the son of Heli.

They also both agree that Jesus is descended from King David, but they trace that descent through two completely different lines. In the Gospel of Matthew, that lineage is traced through the line of kings that succeeded David on the throne in Jerusalem, from his son Solomon through to the last king of Judah before the exile in Babylon. But in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is descended from David’s son Nathan, who nobody has ever heard of. Neither have they heard of any of the other people between Nathan and Joseph.

Something to Explain Away

And usually that’s where people stop. They notice that these two accounts of Jesus’ family tree are different. And for some, that becomes a problem that they need to explain away because, well, both genealogies cannot be correct, right? And if one is wrong then the Bible must contain errors and that is not acceptable to them.

Some try to explain it by saying that one of the Gospels is giving the family tree for Joseph while the other is giving it for Mary. Some of you may have heard that one before. But it is an explanation that quickly falls apart if you look at it. Ancient people never traced genealogies through women. They didn’t even think that women contributed anything to the genetics of a child, so the idea that a woman could contribute to someone’s lineage was simply unthinkable to them. I know that is a foolish way to think of it, but patriarchal thinking is ultimately a very foolish way of thinking about anything.

Living with the Contradiction

No, the contradiction is there, and you can’t just explain it away. So, if you are someone who believes (as I do) that the Bible is inspired by God, what you must conclude is that that contradiction is there for a reason – that it is there because there is a truth deeper than just a list of names that needs to be revealed. You are being invited to struggle with that contradiction in order to discover that deeper truth.

And so that is what I would like to do – live in that contradiction for a little while and tell a story about what I find there.

A Funeral

David, the king, was dead. And, as he was laid in the tomb, his many sons gathered around. But two of them stood out before the crowd.

The first, of course, was David’s son Solomon. And everyone knew why he mattered. He had already been anointed king and had even started to take over his father’s duties before he died. Solomon was dressed in sumptuous robes and surrounded by sycophantic courtiers.

But, as splendid as he looked, Solomon was still just a young man who felt almost entirely out of his depth. He had barely survived a succession crisis and wasn’t sure whether or not he would be able to hold on to the extraordinary power that had been passed onto him.

Nathan

The other key person who was present was a son named Nathan. No one really knew who Nathan was, but he mattered. He mattered because he was the man who was charged with the care of the tomb in which David was being laid.

David was being buried with his fathers, which meant that he was being placed in the tomb of Jesse and of his father Obed and of his father Boaz. It was also the resting place of an extraordinary woman named Ruth. Nathan was there because that tomb rested on a piece of land that now belonged to him.

You see, while Solomon would henceforth live in Jerusalem in a palace made of cedar, Nathan would remain and live on the land that had sustained the family for generations – ever since the days of Joshua who had given the land to the people.

God’s Promise

God had made a promise to David through his prophet. “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors,” God had said, “I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.”

And as they stood around the tomb and gazed upon the beauty and the wonder that was the young man Solomon, the people present, Nathan included, had no doubt who would inherit that promise. If anyone could establish a kingdom that would last forever, it would be Solomon, the son of David and Bathsheba.

A Dynasty’s Failures

But you know what they say about power corrupting; that branch of the family went off the rails almost right away. Solomon quickly began to believe his own propaganda and to use his power to exploit the people through things like forced labour. The richer he became, the more he acted like any other tyrant, lording it over all the people; he became a new pharaoh. Is it any wonder, therefore, that after he died, his great kingdom split apart?

So, the kingdom was greatly diminished. Yet the ruling dynasty endured. And it was true that some of them tried to do their best as rulers. They sought to reform the nation and set up systems to protect the people. But for every good king in the line of David, it often seemed as if there was one or more who fell far short.

The kingdom limped along. It was almost destroyed by the Assyrians; it only survived their attacks by the grace of God. And then came the Babylonians. The House of David failed that challenge entirely, made the wrong choice again and again. The final rulers of the House of David were taken into exile. Their kingdom, which had been supposed to last forever, was no more.

Had the line of David failed?

The Other Line

And where was the other line of David – the descendants of Nathan – all that time? The most likely answer is that they remained on that same piece of land where they had been forever – the same piece of land where Ruth met Boaz while gleaning in his fields – the same piece of land where the boy David had returned with his flocks at the end of the day.

They farmed the land, grew lentils, grapes and barley. They never grew rich or lorded over others. They never made disastrous alliances with other nations either. They just subsisted.

It is even possible that, since they were not so important that invaders would care about them, they weren’t caught up in the deportations of the Babylonian Empire. Maybe they just maintained that connection to the land.

The Connection Remains

At least we know that that connection still remained generations upon generations later for Joseph the son of Heli, even though he no longer lived on that land. He was living in the small hamlet of Nazareth in the territory of Galilee. He didn’t have any land there. He was only managing to get by as a day labourer on construction sites – building with wood and stone. (That’s likely what the gospel writers mean when they call him a carpenter.) People often ended up living like that when their debts and poverty led to the loss of their ancestral farms.

So Joseph had lost the land, but I suspect that that had happened fairly recently – like within living memory of the family. I know that he hadn’t forgotten it because, when Joseph heard, in the days of Quirinius the Governor of Syria, that a census was being held in Judea, he apparently decided to return there. Maybe he was intending to use the registration of the census to lay a claim on his ancestral farm, reclaiming it according to the ancient biblical law of the Jubilee. In any case, it seems that he was serious enough to take along with him the young woman, Mary, to whom he was betrothed and who was expecting a child. He must have had a very good reason if he was going to take her on such a journey.

Missing the Point

I think you are missing out on a great deal if you look at the Gospel of Luke’s genealogy of Jesus and all you see is a list of mostly unpronounceable names and a historical puzzle. Many people don’t seem to get past the pretty obvious historical questions of how you reconcile these two irreconcilable genealogies or how Luke could have even known who these ancestors were, given the very low literacy rates in Galilee at that time. But these are the wrong questions. They miss the point.

I believe that God inspired both of these authors. Sometimes people seem to think that the obvious conclusion you have to take from that is that whatever the authors wrote therefore has to be completely accurate information. But accurate information is only one way to communicate important truths. And God is entirely free to inspire people to communicate truth in various ways.

Ancient Genealogies

Genealogies in the ancient world did not work like what happens today when people do their family trees or order an ancestry service from 23 and Me. Those modern activities are data driven, but ancient genealogies were more story driven. It was about telling the story of the past and thus the future of a family.

We’ll never know where Luke got his list of names for Jesus’ ancestors (at least in the generations between Heli and David – obviously he got the part after that from the Old Testament. But it doesn’t really matter if they came from a written record, from family lore that had been handed down by word of mouth or if they came from his own inspired mind. What really matters is the story that he was telling. And he was telling a story about a very different kind of family than Matthew was telling in his gospel.

The Truth About the Messiah

He was telling a story of a family that was incredibly closely tied to their ancestral lands but who had then lost that connection. He was telling a story about jubilee which was an ancient biblical law that was all about reconnecting families to the lands that they had lost. He was telling a story, above all, that would end with Joseph returning to that ancestral home with his betrothed wife for the birth of a child who would be the fulfillment of the promise given to David but ultimately squandered by Solomon’s line.

I don’t necessarily believe that Luke told the story of this family in this way because he knew it was historically accurate. He told it this way because he knew that it was true. And he knew that it was true because he had been inspired by God. And that is how I have come to understand the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke.